CIA brags that televisions will be its best agents

Top US spooks at the CIA have been bragging that agents will not have to go through all the time consuming problems of planting bugs in homes, businesses or other places where they want to spy thanks to the next advances in computer and Internet technology.

CIA Director David Petraeus said that the new apps and the rise of "connected" devices means people, essentially, will be bugging their own homes. All the CIA will have to do is "read" these and other gadgets from outside the places they want to monitor via the Internet and perhaps even with radio waves outside your home.

Petraeus, who sounds like a Harry Potter spell, said the flood of app-controlled devices were a doddle to read manipulated and controlled. Spies, instead, will simply monitor activity through existing apps in use by the subject. The use of these devices and the technology to use them to spy "change our notions of secrecy" and triggers a rethink of "our notions of identity and secrecy."

Pretty soon you could be grassed up by your fridge and your toaster could appear in court to give evidence for the prosecution.